Magnetic Resonance (MR) fingerprinting is a new technique where a number of RF pulses, distributed in time, are applied such that they cause signals from different materials or tissues to have a unique contribution to the measured MR signal. A limited dictionary of precalculated signal contributions from a set or fixed number of substances is compared to the measured MR signals and within a single voxel the composition can be determined. For example if it is known that a voxel only contains water, fat, and muscle tissue the contribution from these three materials need only be considered and only a few RF pulses are needed to accurately determine the composition of the voxel.
The magnetic resonance fingerprinting technique was introduced in the journal article Ma et. al., “Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting,” Nature, Vol. 495, pp. 187 to 193, doi:10.1038/nature11971. The magnetic fingerprinting technique is also described in United States patent applications US 2013/0271132 A1 and US 2013/0265047 A1.